


You Made That?

by ckret2



Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [21]
Category: Godzilla (2014), Godzilla - All Media Types, Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Technology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Getting to Know Each Other, Interspecies Relationship(s), M/M, Non-Human Courting Practices, Wooing, Worldbuilding, aliens mutually underestimating each other's capabilities, it's kind of condescending tbh, kaiju can make globes and radios and we just have to deal with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:15:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22026943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Rodan thinks it’s time to try teaching his alien nest guests about the geography of the planet they’re now living on, and starts making an object to help him do that; and meanwhile, Ghidorah attempts to tap into the humans’ radio broadcasts with some foraged tech.Both of themwildlyunderestimate the level of technological advancement of each other’s projects.
Relationships: King Ghidorah/Rodan
Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1476800
Comments: 10
Kudos: 102





	You Made That?

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted Sept 22. This is part of an ongoing series of Rodorah one-shots. If you don’t want to read the others, all you need to know is: Ghidorah’s an empath, but a cruddy one who can only read/transfer emotions by head-to-head contact; and Rodan’s never heard the word “Rodan” before and considers himself Nido; and due to the fact that Ghidorah’s only just barely learning Rodan’s language, they know jack shit about each other’s species and backgrounds.
> 
> Somebody on ko-fi requested that I upload the rest of my Rodorah fics to AO3, and like... buddy I hear you, and I'm gonna, I promise, but like... I was already doing that. I'm uploading my backlog of fics three a week because that's as often as I can tolerate proofing/posting old fics, and also I don't wanna flood the Godzilla section. But don't worry! I'm not gonna stop uploading them until I'm caught up. I'm just not gonna start going faster than I already was.
> 
> This fic's got a companion piece, "[Monarch Flips Out](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22059766)," which is about Monarch observing what Ghidorah & Rodan are doing this fic.

So.

The golden ones were aliens.

Nido had woken up long before morning and found himself unable to get back to sleep—too distracted by watching the golden ones restlessly stir and toss on the slope beside his nest, too distracted by the clear starry sky above, too distracted by wondering which star they'd come from.

Their being aliens didn't change much, in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it probably meant that if he and the golden ones _did_ make it all the way through the courting process, they weren't going to be producing any eggs. But not all couples were fertile and there was no shame in that.

More importantly, the fact that they were aliens meant that Nido had severely underestimated how much he was going to need to teach them. Until he’d found out their origin, he’dassumed that he and they were at _least_ operating on a basic shared understanding of what terrestrial life was like—but now? For all Nido knew, when they'd run into each other in a hurricane and tried to kick each other's asses, that might have been the first time the golden ones had ever met another sentient person. Nido had no clue how long they'd been on Earth before he'd woken up, or how long they'd been by themselves in space before that.

It had probably been lonely.

So among all the other things Nido now realized he had to teach them, he had a new top priority: he had to introduce them to the planet properly. And for that, he needed a teaching aid.

He got to work.

###

They'd been sleeping fitfully since arriving on the red sprite's island. The machine makers tended to keep lights trained in their direction, disturbing their rest. And the knowledge that they were so close to such people—machine makers, slave takers, pet keepers—kept them too wary to sleep easily, such that usually at least one of them was half-awake all night. But when they _did_ sleep, they invariably woke precisely at the crack of dawn, the moment sunlight first glimmered on their scales.

Their red sprite was less regular with his wake-up times, but generally slept a bit later, not crawling out of his volcano and shaking off the lava until after the sun was fully up. Today, though, he'd beaten them to waking up; when Third raised his head to peer around, the red sprite called a greeting and then ignored them, his attention absorbed in some new rock he was manipulating. Maintaining his nest, maybe? They weren't sure whether a volcano needed maintenance, but it was possible.

They'd leave him to it. They had their own project to work on. Before the brief crisis that had driven them off the island, they'd foraged a couple of music boxes and a ruined vehicle from one of the machine maker cities they'd half flattened, but then had left the island before they'd had a chance to get one of the music boxes working. Perhaps today was their opportunity.

They went searching for their abandoned project, hoping the machine makers hadn't removed it while they were gone.

###

There was a trick to making spheres.

Anyone's first instinct would be to pick up a fat wad of lava and try to squish it into a spherical shape before it hardened, right? But in Nido's experience, it was impossible to make a sphere like that. The real way to do it was by scooping up a tiny bit of lava, pressing it into shape with his claw tips, and then adding a little bit more at a time and slowly growing it. By the time it was the proper size, he had to roll onto his back so he could work the growing sphere with both his claws and talons.

And then came the details, painstakingly reconstructed from instinct and memory alike—adding thin layers of lava a bit at a time, delicately pinching up ridges and pushing down grooves, sometimes holding the sphere in place with his claws so he could sculpt with his talons, and sometimes needing to stabilize it with his talons and work it with his claws.

As the morning wore on, it slowly came together.

###

The red sprite had been playing in the lava for half a day now. They wondered what in the world he was up to.

Every time they glanced up from their work at him, it looked like he was making a ball out of lava—and it was steadily growing larger. Whatever for? To satisfy some primitive instinct they just didn't know the purpose of yet? Or maybe making rock balls was a form of play to his species? Or—they _were_ officially courting now—maybe offering lava balls was a mating instinct for his kind. Some sort of "look at how strong and dexterous I am, I'd be a good mate" type of thing. Hm. Well, if he presented it to them in a few hours, they'd do their best to act duly impressed. They supposed it _did_ demonstrate an impressive amount of persistence for what was basically an untrained animal.

They turned back to their own work. They'd been painstakingly cracking apart their foraged vehicle with their teeth; and now that it was in pieces, they were trying to chew the aluminum parts together into a rough log shape. It hurt their jaws—they'd probably have to crack out a few teeth before they were done—but teeth were easy to regrow and they could take the chewing in turns. 

It was Third's turn when they saw the red sprite finally flutter out of his nest, set the ball heavily at the base of the volcano, and start ripping up trees with his talons. He curled one of his wings in front of himself like a makeshift basket to drop the trees into; the wood immediately started smoking. What in the world was he doing _now?_ They stopped chewing to watch, perplexed, as he hopped to the beach and started scooping sand into his wing along with the plants. Then he hopped back up the volcano, leaving the ball at its base.

They stared after him for a moment, debating with each other about whether they should go spy. They decided any possible consequences couldn't possibly be as bad as the curiosity was, and crawled up the volcano to watch.

They pretended not to be that interested, of course. They were there for their _own_ project. Third spat the aluminum log into the lava and Second rolled it over with his snout, letting the lava soften the metal. Meanwhile, First and Third did an admittedly poor job of acting like they weren't watching the red sprite.

He'd folded his free wing over his collection of trees and sand, waded chest-deep into the lava, and was... apparently, sticking his beak into a narrow gap between his wings to peer at the mess. What, to watch the burning trees? Inhale the smell? Was this potpourri to him?

Once the aluminum was soft enough to work, First plucked it out—careful not to burn his tongue—and they rolled onto their back so he could start rolling out the aluminum into wire between his snout and their chest. Static crackled around the aluminum rod.

And as he worked, Second and Third stole the occasional curious glances back at the red sprite.

###

Nido wasn't sure if the golden ones were trying to eat that chunk of metal, or torture it. From the looks on their faces and the fact that they had to take turns chewing, he was pretty sure the metal was doing a better job of torturing _them_. Between their lava taste testing session a couple of nights ago where they'd refused to try any lava until it had hardened and now this, Nido was getting the impression that they made a habit of eating their food uncooked. He couldn't imagine why. It looked absolutely miserable. Maybe they couldn't cook in outer space? Or maybe despite having made it to space, their species hadn't discovered cooking. Nido supposed one didn't have to be very advanced to make it to space, did one?

Well, if they _wanted_ to cook it, they knew where his nest was. He took it on faith that they at least knew what they were doing well enough that they wouldn't choke on their unpleasant snack, and returned to his work.

Just like making a sphere out of lava, there was a delicate technique to turning sand into glass. Nido's natural body heat and the heat of his volcano only got sand most of the way to melting. The rest of the difference had to be made up with wood fire. Wings cupped around the silica and trees to keep in the heat, only two tiny cracks left open between them in the front and the back—blowing _just_ the right amount of air into the front gap, enough to let the fire burn as hot and fast as possible but not enough to blow any of the extra heat out of the back. It took practice to get right—figuring out just the right way to cup his wings, the precise speed at which to blow, the exact heat he should be feeling in his wings.

He'd had to learn how to do it not from another of his kind, but from someone who had seen his kind do it long before he was hatched and could explain the process to him. It had taken a lot of trial and error to get as good as he had, and he _still_ thought there had to be a lot that he should know about the art but didn't, because the information hadn't been among his inborn instincts. Sometimes he wondered what other skills had died with the elders of his kind that he'd never had a chance to meet.

Well—maybe he was no artisan, but at least he could get the job done. And when more of his kind hatched, he could show them.

Once he was sure that he'd gotten into the groove of stoking the fire and that everything was the right temperature, he glanced over at the golden ones—and nearly choked. What the hell were they doing now?

When he'd seen them from the corner of his eye at the edge of the crater, he'd thought they'd finally figured out their snack was inedible and taken it up to melt it properly. But now they'd taken it back _out_ of the lava and were... rolling it into a noodle? Why in the world...

It occurred to him that maybe they'd spotted him making his sphere, not understood what he was doing or why he was doing it, and decided to try to imitate him. So they'd come up to try to roll something of their own. It was precious, if so. Completely useless, but precious. Although Nido _was_ honestly kind of impressed by how thin they were getting that metal string of theirs.

Well, they'd see what Nido was up to soon.

He could feel the liquid glass pooling into the grooves in his armor. He peeked in to make sure the last of the sand had melted, the hopped down the volcano to add it to his sphere before it cooled.

###

Once they'd finished making enough wire and returned to where they'd left their music boxes, their entire collective attention had been absorbed by the painstaking process of coiling the tiny, delicate wire around a branch no thicker than the tip of a horn. They wished they had something more even to work with—one of the long straight poles in the machine makers' town, perhaps—but, unless they wanted to risk the machine makers' wrath for stealing some of their property... They surely already had to be on thin ice for all the cities they'd either flattened or drowned. They weren't going to let an act of petty theft be the thing that re-inspired the machine makers to start lobbing missiles at them and the red sprite.

They were focused so hard on their task—wrapping wire, connecting it to one of the music boxes, twisting and manipulating the ends— that they hardly made note of the red sprite as he repeated his process with the trees and sand several more times, until, perched at the top of the volcano, he called, "Hey! Look!"

They glanced up to see him delicately holding the sphere between two clawtips and idly spinning it with his thumbs. Ah—so they'd been right, he _did_ intend it as a gift. Well, they'd act appropriately grateful. It was cute that he thought a ball would impress someone who'd traveled between the stars.

They scooped up their mess of metal parts in one claw and carried it up the volcano with them—after they'd finished all the connections on their radio, they'd need _something_ to seal the wires together. Lava was a poor solder but it would get the job done. They set their unfinished project on what remained of the machine makers' mountaintop building and leaned in to inspect their red sprite's work.

###

Nido watched curiously as the golden ones set down the strange bundle of metal and wood they'd been fussing with. He still wasn't sure they _weren't_ somehow trying to copy him—the fact that they'd added a tree to their work certainly suggested they were—but he was less confident now. They'd tossed in some human hive detritus, too. Why? For decoration? Was this art to them? Did their species _have_ art?

But then he had their full attention, so he refocused on the lesson at hand.

He held up the sphere so the golden ones could see his carefully-sculpted depiction of the planet—the world a sphere made of new volcanic rock, continents and islands standing out in bas relief layers on top of the base sphere, mountain ranges and valley carved by claw, oceans of smooth dark glass between the continents, swirls of wood ash in the glass to depict underwater volcanoes that once had been islands or someday could be.

He held up the globe with two clawtips on the poles so it could spin freely. "This is Earth," he said, and hoped they got that he was giving the name of the actual planet and not the rock in his wings. He carefully turned the globe so that their side of it was on top. "We are—"

" _What!_ "

For a moment, Nido's whole field of view was taken up by excitedly fluttering golden wings. He could no longer see his globe for the vast array of horns and faces hovering over it. He held the globe further out so he didn't get poked in the eye by someone’s horn. "Um—"

"You—it?" Even _more_ spines filled his view as they whipped forward a tail to tap at the globe. "You, it?"

"I... made it?" Nido supplied.

"You _made_ it?"

"Yes?"

They exclaimed something in an unintelligible language. A single spine on their tail carefully touched the infinitesimally small fleck of glass-surrounded rock that represented Nido's own island. "You and us? Volcano here?"

"Yes. That's here." Great, they got the concept.

They tapped several spines on the smooth glass. "What it?"

They were forgetting some of their grammar in their excitement. "That's the ocean." He was sure they'd covered oceans already. "It's—"

"No! No no no. What _it?_ " They tapped more insistently on the glass. "Is beach? Nido made beach it?"

Oh. They were talking about the globe itself. "Sand," he corrected. "I made sand into glass."

" _Glass_. Glass. You glassmade? You are a glassmade? When you—?" They backed off and briefly reared up on their legs so they could clasp their wings together in imitation of his sand-melting process.

"Glassmaker?"

They dropped back down on their wings and leaned in, staring at him with a triple set of wide eyes. "You are _glassmaker?_ "

"Y... yes?"

It was easy to forget that the golden ones' heads were completely made of nightmares and knives until they were looming over him, cheek to cheek, with their jaws dropped, so he could get a rather terrifying look straight into their throats.

And then one thin but surprisingly strong wing scooped the globe out of Nido's grasp and clutched it close to their chest. "Is good," they gushed. "Good good good. Love it." The middle one bopped their foreheads together—Nido got a flash of awe-admiration-delight-intimidation-gratitude-adoration—and then they scooped up their strange metal project in one mouth and retreated down the volcano, globe tucked tightly to their chest, to sit and admire Nido's handiwork in the late afternoon sunlight.

"Oh," Nido said. "Okay, yeah. We'll continue the lesson tomorrow.

At least they liked it.

###

He made glass. He made a functional, geographically-accurate globe. He added topographical features. He marked the axes. He _made glass_.

They had, they realized, been terrifyingly underestimating the red sprite's intelligence.

Up until now they had assumed that he was, more or less, an animal. His capacity for language did nothing to disqualify him from the category of animals; _most_ animals could be taught language. They’d known for some time now that he was a _clever_ animal, yes—an animal that could count and understand abstract concepts. Being an animal was about lacking the capacity to create _culture_ —and that meant invention, construction, technology.

Looking at everything about the red sprite—flying about blithely naked, content to fight his battles unaided by no weapons but his own body parts, living in a literal hole in the earth—that was what they'd been _sure_ he was. An animal. A creature that could be taught tricks by intelligent people—taught to copy their machines, perhaps even to work them—but lacking the cunning to come up with any himself. A simple beast, clever enough to understand abstract concepts, but divorced from and incapable of integrating with civilization.

In other words: they'd assumed he was the same thing _they_ were.

 _Their_ only advantage over any other animal came from having been once domesticated by a machine maker species. They had the benefit of an education—they'd been taught tricks.

But it was quickly becoming apparent that although the red sprite lacked a machine maker education, he had a machine maker mind. His species was perhaps not yet the _technological_ equal of the tiny people south of his volcano, but it was certainly the _intellectual_ equal. Artmaking. Mapmaking. _Glassmaking_.

They were collectively in awe of him—and in awe of the fact that he considered _them_ worth courting. Because they could beat him in a fight. Hah. So what? Strong animals beat smart people all the time.

It was only a matter of time until he figured out that, for all their flash and fury, they brought nothing to the table. Eventually he was going to see that he belonged in the ranks of pet owners—and they were just three feral pets.

Glumly, they set the globe down—between their legs, so they could cradle it protectively—and returned to trying to finish their radio. They could worry about soldering the wires later, they might as well test it first.

Ah, there it went—it took some effort to twist their far larger aluminum wire together with the nearly-invisible wires they'd pried out of the music box, but now it was hissing comfortable electric static that thrummed in different tones as his electric field shifted around it. They fiddled with their coil of wire, trying to find a machine maker radio station.

###

Nido watched as the golden ones turned the globe over and over, studying it from three angles, brushing wings and tails and tongues over the surface. (They were _really_ into licking stuff. He wondered what in the world they got out of knowing what glass tasted like.)

He was crouched on the rim of his volcanic crater, dipping his wings in the lava and swishing them around to try to crack and peel off the bits of glass that had dried on his armor as he'd worked. All the while, he watched the golden ones' fascinated examination. He hadn't expected them to be so enthusiastic over a simple globe. Maybe he should have? Now that he thought of it, he had no reason to think they'd ever seen glass before. Well— _surely_ they'd seen _some_ kind of glass—naturally occurring glasses, like obsidian or the weak flakes humans produced in their hives—but not deliberately-made glass. And although they'd figured out the purpose of a globe pretty quickly—they'd immediately pointed out their own location, after all—they acted like they'd never encountered _that_ concept before, either.

So, wherever the golden ones were from, it probably didn't have any people who were terribly advanced in the arts. Or maybe it _did_ , but for some reason—perhaps whatever had caused them to end up in space—they'd never seen whatever craftwork their world's people were capable of. Never had a chance to learn from their own elders.

Which was fine, if so. It just meant more things he got to teach them about. It'd be good practice for when there were others of his own kind that would be looking to their sole elder to teach them whatever couldn't be passed on by instinct alone. And the golden ones were such _intensely_ attentive learners. It wouldn't be long before they got the hang of Earth's available technologies—

A burst of noise shot up from near the golden ones—like cacophonous singing in a dozen voices from a dozen different creatures he'd never heard before. Nido started, then jerked his wings out of the lava and shook them off, hopping around the rim to see the golden ones better. They appeared completely unperturbed by the noise. "What _is_ that?" Nido yelled.

The left head twisted around to glance back at him, but hesitated. "We do not know name."

Nido flapped down to investigate. The golden ones had the bundle of metal noodles/wood parts/human detritus balanced carefully on the globe. The racket was warbling out of their chunk of human detritus. The right head was carefully manipulating one of the slender pieces of metal with his teeth while the middle one bent close to watch the procedure. "You made that?" Nido asked, stunned.

"Yes," the left head replied.

"You _made_ that?"

"Yeh," the right grunted around the metal. Without looking up, the middle said, "And?" As though anyone could take a pile of rubbish and teach it to squawk terrible music.

Nido stared at them. Well, he immediately took back everything he'd assumed about their technological background. He plopped down next to the golden ones.

The music petered out—he _thought_ it was music, anyway—replaced by a single voice from an unknown species babbling in a language Nido had never heard before. The left head picked up a pebble, flicked it at the contraption the voice was emanating from, and asked, "Do you understand?"

"No." He'd never heard a creature anything like that before.

The golden ones made a noise of acknowledgment and curled a tail around their globe.

Together, they listened to the strange music.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/187873188007/you-made-that). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!


End file.
